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If you’ve spent time trying to analyze twitter data you undoubtedly have come across the topic problem.

The Problem
“What’s this tweet about?”
“Are there other tweets that are related?”

Somewhere along the way, Twitter, it seems, decided the hashtag was enough to answer the above.

Hashtags are the wild west of naming conventions. Anyone can create or use one (and most people don’t). Further, with a character limited tweet, proper tagging cuts into tweet content.

But as a user, I want to be able to find all tweets about a news story, an event, a book that was just released. Relying on Twitter users to manually add hashtags to do that is a fail whale of a different color.

The Solution
Why hasn’t Twitter borrowed from Delicious – a service that finds the balance between the freedom and discovery of a folksonomy, and the clarity and utility of a taxonomy?

Why not auto suggest tags as someone generates the tweet? And these tags don’t count against the character limit. And further, if someone doesn’t select or create a tag, Twitter auto generates one (and designates it differently than a user generated/selected one).

Just as I can search for an @ so I can connect a person, making a # (or a new version of a tag) work the same way could make Twitter even more powerful — and make it more money.

A Consumer Use Case
Imagine I just watched top chef last week and I wanted to Tweet about a cheftestant. I start drafting my pithy tweet and auto suggested tags include: top chef, top chef season 8, top chef season 8 episode 7, top chef cheftestant smith.

Since I’m commenting on Cheftestant Smith about her performance in episode 7 of the current season, I select those two last tags.

Later, when a fan of Cheftestant Smith (or she herself), is searching for tweets, she doesn’t have to use an @ people search on herself (and if she used twitter, the autosuggest would suggest her @ handle as well). But more useful, instead of relying on a #topchef tag, searching on top chef would bring up all the tags as discussed above, allowing a user to see more related tweets (rather than those hashtagged), less noise (created by NLP searches), and drill down (a certain episode, ingredient, etc of the episode).

But how does this make Twitter money?

The Business Case

1. Tag Bidding

2. Page Buying

3. Tag Structuring

Using the previous use case, imagine where Bravo can get value. First, they bid on auto suggest tags — they can help structure the conversation. And auto suggest will bring in both “paid” and “organic” tags to ensure the user still finds value in the tags.

Then, for each tag, a “page” can be registered/bought. When someone clicks a tag, they go to that page that aggregates the conversations, but also allows for custom content as well — sponsored links blossom into sponsored tags and pages.

Finally, organizations can created “tag structures.” In the Iron Chef example, Bravo could create a taxonomy of tags, creating order and hierarchy around the folksonomy — show level tags, episode, etc.

Both Franz Ferdinand Tonight:Franz Ferdinand and Andrew Bird Noble Beast have released new albums in the past 30 days. I started thinking about how good they are, relative to one another.

In my initial preview I found “Tonight” to be the same old Franz — in a boring way, while “Noble Bird” was the same old Andrew in a good way. I turned to Twitter and Google to see what everyone else is thinking.

First, Google shows parity in the US across the two acts in search, with Franz Ferdinand getting substantially more news hits. Oddly, the albums were released in separate weeks and search results don’t reflect this.

Andrew versus Franz

The most interesting distinction through Google Trends came through the location information. I started with no regional filters. Franz Ferdinand popped very high in Croatia and other seemingly odd places. I then filtered for only in the United States.

Andrew versus Franz by location

Bird crushed Franz Ferdinand in Austin, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and Minneapolis. FF dominated Irvine, CA and LA. Not sure what that means? Bird rocks and FF doesn’t (yes I live in Chicago).

Franz versus Andrew

Twitterers are making more noise about Franz Ferdinand (sorry about the color swap, blue = bird in these graphs) — though in general, the tweet rate looks low. They start to look similar over the last few days.

The real metrics here are actual listens, downloads, or sales. Based on current Amazon Sales Rank, in CD format, “Tonight” ranks #36 and “Noble Beast” ranks #94. However, as an MP3 download,”Tonight” ranks #54 and “Noble Beast” dominates at #12.

I have a few tools I can use moving forward to track this stuff in more detail. Not sure what to make out of this just yet — but interesting nonetheless.